7 ms·

Airbnb CEO says it's still too early for AI trip planning

28 points by smgit 2y ago

ElectRabbit 2y ago
LLMs are stellar for trip planning. They can spit out a lot of potential options for a country or region. I just add all the suggestions to a map and then plan way around them. Also doing some manual research like opening times. Why I love this? I really don't want to research too deep into my destinations as this kills a lot of the magic seeing seeing them in person.
- iLoveOncall 2y ago
  That's just inferior to going on Tripadvisor and looking at the list of things to do. Tripadvisor will have the same activities, but you have user reviews, pictures, you can book tickets, etc.
  - ElectRabbit 2y ago
    TA is IMHO far from useable when planing complex tours in a country. I even prefer reading Reddit travel reports or indexes of travel books for reading stuff on that website.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  Plenty of positives, but consider the negatives with current-generation language models. It takes one hallucination to put your life in danger.
  - iLoveOncall 2y ago
    > to put your life in danger Or much more likely, to waste your time. DeepSeek recommended us to visit a place that was actually privately owned and couldn't be visited at all. Traditional methods (Google Maps, TripAdvisor, etc.) never would have.
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      Just last week I was looking up how much of some chemical was required for toxic effects, and Google's AI response, sitting right at the top, gave me a number that was off by magnitudes. I ignored it and found a factual answer by corroborating multiple sources. That is the difference between life and death. > DeepSeek recommended us to visit a place that was actually privately owned and couldn't be visited at all. One time some friends of mine got the wrong address for a party. When they showed up, a man was sitting on his porch with a shotgun, and he shot at their car multiple times while they hurriedly backed out of his driveway. A wrong address can be deadly, especially in unknown territory. And please understand, I have personally created prototype agentic booking systems with route planning, concierge integrations and more. I am very excited about this space but also extremely cautious knowing exactly where cutting LLMs are and aren't useful enough not only for trusting your business logic with them, but trusting the safety of your customers.
- troupo 2y ago
  > They can spit out a lot of potential options for a country or region. If you're going to all the crowded tourist-y places, sure. It's a struggle to make them suggest anything off the beaten path for obvious reasons
  - ElectRabbit 2y ago
    I tested it with several places I know very well from my "manually planed" tours. It was "aware" of them all. Even the more hidden recommendations.
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  The founder of Viator had an interesting take on this in an interview (How I Built This [0]). The gist is that the people who deeply research and plan, they create this perfect vision of the trip in their head. When you actually go on the trip, things can go wrong; weather is bad, destination was crowded, you got sick, etc. But years later, the perfect version of the trip and the actual version of the trip get mixed up in your memories. People who didn't plan, didn't have this "idealized" version imprinted. I find this to be true so my spouse and I plan our trips meticulously and research everything. We also capture a detailed log of our trips. And I think this combination really helps to highlight and reinforce the good memories while letting the not so good ones fade. [0] https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-viator-rod-cuthbert/ https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-via...
  - dangus 2y ago
    I think this if taken too far sounds a lot like work. One of my favorite trips involved planning as far as a train trip and booking a hostel. But beyond that my group basically blew off every plan we had and hung around the hostel because they had a really nice free pool table and really good cheap food and booze. That is probably one of my top three trips of my life. I find my memories compressed because it was basically 5 days of Groundhog Day but it was a great time. Making a daily log sounds miserable to me but then again I strongly dislike journaling. Then again the phenomenon you bring up might contribute to what people love about Disney World so much. You have to do a lot of planning to get a lot out of it, and therefore you remember everything you did clearly because so much time was spent planning. I think I could tell you every restaurant I went to on my last trip since I had to fight for reservations and I was setting each day’s plan months ahead of time.
    - stavros 2y ago
      It's great that you had a fun time hanging out with friends, but spending a few days with friends around a pool table and bar isn't really a trip, it's a gathering. Trips tend to be centered around the place you're going to, with experiences you can only have at that place, and nowhere else.
amarcheschi 2y ago
My mother works in a travel agency and she says it's nice asking chatgpt for suggestions, however she takes suggestions the same way that a seasoned programmer would with chatgpt code: as a baseline. Even if more people are visiting the same city, chances are the things they wanna see might be different, and chatgpt just says the most famous things to visit when prompted "give me a trip plan for <city>"
- gurubavan 2y ago
  If you can say, what are her clientele like?
  - amarcheschi 2y ago
    They do both business and individual trips in that agency. I guess she uses it the most for "citizen" trips and not for business trips, since on business trips they just have to manage the plane, pick ups (...) Mostly middle higher class to higher class. There are exceptions of course, but regular Joe of people wanting to save money will plan a trip for themselves
nathancahill 2y ago
Best AI assisted trip planner I use is wanderlog.com. They have the right balance of using LLMs for idea generation, match the data to opening times via Google and travel times between locations. Lots of other nice (non-AI) features too.
- tomaytotomato 2y ago
  Used it for a 120 day trip to Asia, but the UI got slow after adding more than 30 days of itinerary. Its still okay to use, I just had to break the trip up into individual countries, but was hoping it wouldn't clog up so much.
  - well_actulily 2y ago
    We used it for a two week trip to Singapore and Japan last year, and yeah, I agree the app performance for packed trips is pretty rough.
throw098320923 2y ago
AI works just fine for trip planning. I use it to scrape Airbnb apartments descriptions and reviews. Common problems such cockroaches or slow internet, are not usually mentioned directly, but with indirect special wording, and LLM can find those very well. Also scraping newest social posts and Tiktok videos is great way to find cool stuff.
- rainonmoon 2y ago
  This is very interesting, can you share a bit more about your methodology/setup?
  - throw098320923 2y ago
    Android app, USB dongle with HDMI capture card. Screenshot goes to OCR and LLM. There is a virtual USB HID mouse build on Arduino that clicks on links.
    - nycdatasci 2y ago
      For more on this setup, see “Web Scraping Fundamentals” by Rube Goldberg.
    - eudhxhdhsb32 2y ago
      Wouldn't it be easier to just interact directly with their web interface through an automated browser?
      - throw098320923 2y ago
        I prefer to scrape their Android app.
      - stogot 2y ago
        I tried this on another site and got blocked. You need to be aware of how bot detection works
- suddenlybananas 2y ago
nycdatasci 2y ago
I agree with this take. I tried to use OpenAI Operator to find a hotel a few times recently and every time it has made enormous errors like booking for a month and 3 days instead of 3 days because the end date was selected from the next month instead of the current one in the date selector. Completely unusable.
fabioborellini 2y ago
Last time I stayed in a property booked through Airbnb, their translation feature already changed the street name in key pickup location’s address on one French street to another French street (still in French), when translating from French. I’m paranoid enough to check the source language, but that could have been a huge trouble. Staying there was a wonderful opportunity which probably hadn’t realised without Airbnb, or would have been unreachable to foreigners in some national holiday rental service, but it still is too early to generally ditch customer service and known processes. I have stayed around 90% of nights in hotels and hostels during my travels, the rest being Airbnb-style rentals, and I plan to keep it that way for a multitude of reasons.
- mettamage 2y ago
  > I’m paranoid enough to check the source language Same, especially because my crappy command of Italian, French and German (between A2 and B1) catches weird errors like this
chvid 2y ago
Why would anyone use an AI trip planner? If I go for a vacation, planning it and deciding what not to plan is a part of the joy of doing it. Though a big problem at the moment is manipulation of online reviews and recommendations; and as far as I can tell AI is making that worse.
- theshackleford 2y ago
  > Why would anyone use an AI trip planner? Because not everyone will enjoy what you do? It’s not some secret, I still know people who use travel agents for the same reason, others still who stick to cruising precisely because they dont want to think or plan, they just want to do. Mystery solved.
- eloisius 2y ago
  Everything should be a curated feed of slop. Even your travels.
  - senko 2y ago
    This pretty much describes most of mainstream media and news pre-AI as well.
- deadbabe 2y ago
  Planning a trip is not at all fun unless you’re doing something very basic.
- kolinko 2y ago
  I like planning as well (although many people don’t), but I still miss a ton of stuff that chatgpt’s Deep Research can find.
- ghxst 2y ago
  From my experience, there are tons of interesting places in my country that hardly get talked about online outside of my native language. You won’t really find them on the SEO-boosted travel blogs that google likes to return either. I feel like this is where AI could actually be useful.
amelius 2y ago
I really hate traveling because of all the bureaucracy involved in checking-in, validating emails, validating whatsapp accounts, buying train tickets in foreign countries, doing all this on the small screen of my phone and while I'm sitting on some subway with dropping connections. Oh, and checking into the hotel takes 15 minutes because the clerk needs to make a copy of my passport which I'm questioning the legality of. There's a LOT to be improved here.
- mettamage 2y ago
  What? I just use a laptop. I don't get it. Worst-case, I tether internet via my phone. Also, why are you doing it in the subway? To be fair, I once did vimtutor in a subway [1] and learned vim within two 30 min. rides but not the point :') [1] Thanks to a HN'er like 8 years ago who was kind enough to mention it to me, I never heard of vimtutor and almost have never heard of it since (with 2 exceptions perhaps)
  - amelius 2y ago
    The point is that all of this should be mostly automatic, and/or you should be able to do this before you even leave, and/or it should work in a unified way (the same with all airlines, train services, etc.)
    - mettamage 2y ago
      Right, yea that's fair
- aimazon 2y ago
  Travel can be as easy as you want it to be if you are willing to spend money and/or plan. Stay at hotels that are part of a hotel group (e.g: Marriott) and check-in will be seamless. Use airport transfers and someone will be waiting at the airport with a sign and take you straight to the hotel (any reputable hotel will arrange it for you at a fair price). Use a global e-sim that you can activate when your plane lands. The pain you're describing is a choice (a completely reasonable choice to make for many people, but a choice nonetheless).
iamleppert 2y ago
Last time I used ChatGPT to plan my trip it was a disaster. There’s something about the overly optimistic attitude that paints everything and everywhere as great, when the fact is, as a traveler, a lot of places are absolutely garbage or just too bizarre for words. On ChatGPT’s advice, I ended up checked into a hotel on the grounds of a United Methodist Encampment, complete with check in/out stations manned by angry boomers. Really didn’t see that one coming!

28 points by smgit 2y ago

LLMs are stellar for trip planning. They can spit out a lot of potential options for a country or region. I just add all the suggestions to a map and then plan way around them. Also doing some manual research like opening times. Why I love this? I really don't want to research too deep into my destinations as this kills a lot of the magic seeing seeing them in person.

iLoveOncall 2y ago
That's just inferior to going on Tripadvisor and looking at the list of things to do. Tripadvisor will have the same activities, but you have user reviews, pictures, you can book tickets, etc.
- ElectRabbit 2y ago
  TA is IMHO far from useable when planing complex tours in a country. I even prefer reading Reddit travel reports or indexes of travel books for reading stuff on that website.
soulofmischief 2y ago
Plenty of positives, but consider the negatives with current-generation language models. It takes one hallucination to put your life in danger.
- iLoveOncall 2y ago
  > to put your life in danger Or much more likely, to waste your time. DeepSeek recommended us to visit a place that was actually privately owned and couldn't be visited at all. Traditional methods (Google Maps, TripAdvisor, etc.) never would have.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    Just last week I was looking up how much of some chemical was required for toxic effects, and Google's AI response, sitting right at the top, gave me a number that was off by magnitudes. I ignored it and found a factual answer by corroborating multiple sources. That is the difference between life and death. > DeepSeek recommended us to visit a place that was actually privately owned and couldn't be visited at all. One time some friends of mine got the wrong address for a party. When they showed up, a man was sitting on his porch with a shotgun, and he shot at their car multiple times while they hurriedly backed out of his driveway. A wrong address can be deadly, especially in unknown territory. And please understand, I have personally created prototype agentic booking systems with route planning, concierge integrations and more. I am very excited about this space but also extremely cautious knowing exactly where cutting LLMs are and aren't useful enough not only for trusting your business logic with them, but trusting the safety of your customers.
troupo 2y ago
> They can spit out a lot of potential options for a country or region. If you're going to all the crowded tourist-y places, sure. It's a struggle to make them suggest anything off the beaten path for obvious reasons
- ElectRabbit 2y ago
  I tested it with several places I know very well from my "manually planed" tours. It was "aware" of them all. Even the more hidden recommendations.
CharlieDigital 2y ago
The founder of Viator had an interesting take on this in an interview (How I Built This [0]). The gist is that the people who deeply research and plan, they create this perfect vision of the trip in their head. When you actually go on the trip, things can go wrong; weather is bad, destination was crowded, you got sick, etc. But years later, the perfect version of the trip and the actual version of the trip get mixed up in your memories. People who didn't plan, didn't have this "idealized" version imprinted. I find this to be true so my spouse and I plan our trips meticulously and research everything. We also capture a detailed log of our trips. And I think this combination really helps to highlight and reinforce the good memories while letting the not so good ones fade. [0] https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-viator-rod-cuthbert/ https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-via...
- dangus 2y ago
  I think this if taken too far sounds a lot like work. One of my favorite trips involved planning as far as a train trip and booking a hostel. But beyond that my group basically blew off every plan we had and hung around the hostel because they had a really nice free pool table and really good cheap food and booze. That is probably one of my top three trips of my life. I find my memories compressed because it was basically 5 days of Groundhog Day but it was a great time. Making a daily log sounds miserable to me but then again I strongly dislike journaling. Then again the phenomenon you bring up might contribute to what people love about Disney World so much. You have to do a lot of planning to get a lot out of it, and therefore you remember everything you did clearly because so much time was spent planning. I think I could tell you every restaurant I went to on my last trip since I had to fight for reservations and I was setting each day’s plan months ahead of time.
  - stavros 2y ago
    It's great that you had a fun time hanging out with friends, but spending a few days with friends around a pool table and bar isn't really a trip, it's a gathering. Trips tend to be centered around the place you're going to, with experiences you can only have at that place, and nowhere else.

amarcheschi 2y ago

My mother works in a travel agency and she says it's nice asking chatgpt for suggestions, however she takes suggestions the same way that a seasoned programmer would with chatgpt code: as a baseline. Even if more people are visiting the same city, chances are the things they wanna see might be different, and chatgpt just says the most famous things to visit when prompted "give me a trip plan for <city>"

gurubavan 2y ago
If you can say, what are her clientele like?
- amarcheschi 2y ago
  They do both business and individual trips in that agency. I guess she uses it the most for "citizen" trips and not for business trips, since on business trips they just have to manage the plane, pick ups (...) Mostly middle higher class to higher class. There are exceptions of course, but regular Joe of people wanting to save money will plan a trip for themselves

nathancahill 2y ago

Best AI assisted trip planner I use is wanderlog.com. They have the right balance of using LLMs for idea generation, match the data to opening times via Google and travel times between locations. Lots of other nice (non-AI) features too.

tomaytotomato 2y ago
Used it for a 120 day trip to Asia, but the UI got slow after adding more than 30 days of itinerary. Its still okay to use, I just had to break the trip up into individual countries, but was hoping it wouldn't clog up so much.
- well_actulily 2y ago
  We used it for a two week trip to Singapore and Japan last year, and yeah, I agree the app performance for packed trips is pretty rough.

throw098320923 2y ago

AI works just fine for trip planning. I use it to scrape Airbnb apartments descriptions and reviews. Common problems such cockroaches or slow internet, are not usually mentioned directly, but with indirect special wording, and LLM can find those very well. Also scraping newest social posts and Tiktok videos is great way to find cool stuff.

rainonmoon 2y ago
This is very interesting, can you share a bit more about your methodology/setup?
- throw098320923 2y ago
  Android app, USB dongle with HDMI capture card. Screenshot goes to OCR and LLM. There is a virtual USB HID mouse build on Arduino that clicks on links.
  - nycdatasci 2y ago
    For more on this setup, see “Web Scraping Fundamentals” by Rube Goldberg.
  - eudhxhdhsb32 2y ago
    Wouldn't it be easier to just interact directly with their web interface through an automated browser?
    - throw098320923 2y ago
      I prefer to scrape their Android app.
    - stogot 2y ago
      I tried this on another site and got blocked. You need to be aware of how bot detection works
suddenlybananas 2y ago

nycdatasci 2y ago

I agree with this take. I tried to use OpenAI Operator to find a hotel a few times recently and every time it has made enormous errors like booking for a month and 3 days instead of 3 days because the end date was selected from the next month instead of the current one in the date selector. Completely unusable.

fabioborellini 2y ago

Last time I stayed in a property booked through Airbnb, their translation feature already changed the street name in key pickup location’s address on one French street to another French street (still in French), when translating from French. I’m paranoid enough to check the source language, but that could have been a huge trouble. Staying there was a wonderful opportunity which probably hadn’t realised without Airbnb, or would have been unreachable to foreigners in some national holiday rental service, but it still is too early to generally ditch customer service and known processes. I have stayed around 90% of nights in hotels and hostels during my travels, the rest being Airbnb-style rentals, and I plan to keep it that way for a multitude of reasons.

mettamage 2y ago
> I’m paranoid enough to check the source language Same, especially because my crappy command of Italian, French and German (between A2 and B1) catches weird errors like this

chvid 2y ago

Why would anyone use an AI trip planner? If I go for a vacation, planning it and deciding what not to plan is a part of the joy of doing it. Though a big problem at the moment is manipulation of online reviews and recommendations; and as far as I can tell AI is making that worse.

theshackleford 2y ago
> Why would anyone use an AI trip planner? Because not everyone will enjoy what you do? It’s not some secret, I still know people who use travel agents for the same reason, others still who stick to cruising precisely because they dont want to think or plan, they just want to do. Mystery solved.
eloisius 2y ago
Everything should be a curated feed of slop. Even your travels.
- senko 2y ago
  This pretty much describes most of mainstream media and news pre-AI as well.
deadbabe 2y ago
Planning a trip is not at all fun unless you’re doing something very basic.
kolinko 2y ago
I like planning as well (although many people don’t), but I still miss a ton of stuff that chatgpt’s Deep Research can find.
ghxst 2y ago
From my experience, there are tons of interesting places in my country that hardly get talked about online outside of my native language. You won’t really find them on the SEO-boosted travel blogs that google likes to return either. I feel like this is where AI could actually be useful.

amelius 2y ago

I really hate traveling because of all the bureaucracy involved in checking-in, validating emails, validating whatsapp accounts, buying train tickets in foreign countries, doing all this on the small screen of my phone and while I'm sitting on some subway with dropping connections. Oh, and checking into the hotel takes 15 minutes because the clerk needs to make a copy of my passport which I'm questioning the legality of. There's a LOT to be improved here.

mettamage 2y ago
What? I just use a laptop. I don't get it. Worst-case, I tether internet via my phone. Also, why are you doing it in the subway? To be fair, I once did vimtutor in a subway [1] and learned vim within two 30 min. rides but not the point :') [1] Thanks to a HN'er like 8 years ago who was kind enough to mention it to me, I never heard of vimtutor and almost have never heard of it since (with 2 exceptions perhaps)
- amelius 2y ago
  The point is that all of this should be mostly automatic, and/or you should be able to do this before you even leave, and/or it should work in a unified way (the same with all airlines, train services, etc.)
  - mettamage 2y ago
    Right, yea that's fair
aimazon 2y ago
Travel can be as easy as you want it to be if you are willing to spend money and/or plan. Stay at hotels that are part of a hotel group (e.g: Marriott) and check-in will be seamless. Use airport transfers and someone will be waiting at the airport with a sign and take you straight to the hotel (any reputable hotel will arrange it for you at a fair price). Use a global e-sim that you can activate when your plane lands. The pain you're describing is a choice (a completely reasonable choice to make for many people, but a choice nonetheless).

iamleppert 2y ago

Last time I used ChatGPT to plan my trip it was a disaster. There’s something about the overly optimistic attitude that paints everything and everywhere as great, when the fact is, as a traveler, a lot of places are absolutely garbage or just too bizarre for words. On ChatGPT’s advice, I ended up checked into a hotel on the grounds of a United Methodist Encampment, complete with check in/out stations manned by angry boomers. Really didn’t see that one coming!